Selfies II: Frenzeny and Tavernier

 

Paul Tavernier: Big Medicine Man, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts

At first glance, the watercolor Big Medicine Man resembles Catlin's frontispiece of himself painting the Mandan Chief Mah To Toh Pah: both show an artist portraying Native Americans, in this case, a Chief, his wife and his horse, while other Native Americans stand behind him,looking

Catlin Painting Mah To-Toh Pa

on.  This one is from another, later time period, and was not done by the painter Jules Tavernier himself, but by his partner and fellow artist, Paul Frenzeny. 

 Tavernier and Frenzeny were two illustrators of French origin, who spent most of their lives in the New World and beyond.  For a year (1873-4), they traveled together around what would soon become the continental United States, under a contract from Harper's Magazine, recording the expansion of Euro-American domination during that period.  

 

Their journey is chronicled and analyzed in detail by art historian Claudine Chalmers in her book Chronicling the West for Harper's (2013).  The two men were given passes to ride rapidly expanding rail lines, but also made many side-trips by any transportation they could muster.  Their modus operandi was to prepare their compositions for monochromatic line drawings, transferred by pencil in reverse on thin boxwood blocks-- small ones riveted together, which were then shipped back to New York, to be engraved by Harper's crew of professional wood engravers in pieces, then put back together to be printed along with a moveable-type text, often their own commentary.  Altogether, they produced a hundred of these illustrations that Harper's published between 1873 and 1876, as well as sketches and watercolors for their own use and sale.

 

The growing America they recorded was of a country of rapid expansion, as European and Post Civil-War Americans "won the west," at a time when most of the enduring legends of such settlements were being made.  Beginning with European immigrants arriving in New York, and the hardships of trekking west on uncomfortable trains and other means of transportation, they recorded factories in the east, unrest among coal miners, and as they progressed, what new settlers were doing. They showed Texas cowboys in East Texas on great cattle drives, railroad construction, primitive meteorologists with rudimentary prediction tools in isolated locations, ore smelting, stagecoach supply outposts, and many new towns being built along the new railroad lines.  Some of the things they drew were things of the moment that are now forgotten, such as a lone cowhand doing his job on horseback shading himself with an umbrella, incipient railroad towns being built, the inhabitants living in roofed dugouts until more durable housing could be constructed, and an unusual culture of gypsy-like drifters, called "pilgrims," who migrated back and forth between Arkansas and Texas, doing seasonal work. 

 

There were other, less laudable things too-- ghost towns, hastily built and hastily abandoned when the anticipated railroad line never came; deserted, trashed played-out mining camps, a leadup to a lynching, and the wholesale slaughtering of bison, both by professional hunters, and random railroad passengers killing vast amounts of them by shooting at passing herds out of train windows.

It was also the period of continuing conflict between whites and Native Americans, and the wholesale destruction of the latter's way of life.  Tavernier was fortunate be the only white visitor to witness and record the three-day Sundance festival at Red Cloud Agency--the last of its kind--in June 1874.  It was a coming-of-age ceremony comparable to the Mandan O-Keepa rituals that Catlin had been privileged to witness, but the very title of the scene by Harper's, " Indian Sun Dance–Young Bucks Proving Their Endurance by Self-Torture," speaks of the patronizing attitude of the easterners who would read about it in the artists' dispatches. Tavernier and Franzeny also recorded the degradation of dispossessed Native Americans at trading posts, some bringing in goods to trade, others hanging out at railroad stations and begging, to be ogled by American travelers.

Like Catlin and Bodmer, Frenzeny's portrait of his partner in action was apart from the artists' official assignment, in this case the illustrations for Harper's, but a personal comment of their roles as artists. Frenzeny's watercolor shows Tavernier in a suit, vest, tie and hat, sitting on a folding stool working on a tiny, stretched canvas.  His subjects are formally posed further back, in front of some low white cliffs with treetops behind them. They appear to be clad in buckskin ceremonial garments, and the chief wears a war bonnet. The Native Americans clustered around the white-suited artist wear a motley collection of garments (Chalmers has identified one in the foreground's dress as Cherokee).  Their expressions range from wonder to curiosity to anger, and the picture's title "Big Medicine Man," along with their poses and the raggedy Native American boy exploring Tavernier's paintbox, imply a more "primitive" social state than the light-skinned, bearded painter.  In other words, they reinforce the mid-nineteenth attitude of Manifest Destiny in the spirit of the Harper's series itself.

 

When their contract was up, both men went on to San Francisco, where the lingered awhile among the society of bohemian artists there and in the bay area.  Tavernier spent time with other Native American tribes, including the Elem Pomo community of northern California, got to know many of them well, and made watercolor sketches of ceremonies and other activities.  He had intended eventually to return to Europe via Japan, but ended his life in Hawaii, where he painted volcanoes and died of alcoholism at forty five.

 

Frenzeny too lingered awhile in San Francisco, becoming fascinated with its Chinatown. He continued his association as a traveling illustrator for Harper's which took him to many places, from the Yukon to the north, Mexico and Guatemala in the south, and subsequently to China and Siberia, returning eventually returned to London. He also illustrated at lease seven books, for which he's more remembered today, including the first English edition of Anna Karenina  and some for The Jungle Book.

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The best authority on Tavernier and Frenzeny is Claudine Chalmers, Chronicling the West For Harper's. Coast to Coast with Frenzeny and Tavernier.  Norman, University of Oklahoma Press 2013.  Chalmers continues to publish on Tavernier.

 

For Jules Tavernier's subsequent life in California and Hawaii, see "Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo" TheMetropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Summer, 2021, https://www.metmuseum.org/met-publications/jules-tavernier-and-the-elem-pomo (downloadable).